What Do You Think of the New Netflix Website Changes That Focus on Streaming?

Michael Spiegelman, Netflix's director of product management, announced changes to the Netflix website that put more focus on streaming.

Starting today, most members who watch instantly will see a new interface that provides more focus on the TV shows & movies streaming from Netflix. The title images are larger, there are more of them on the page and play buttons appear when you hover your mouse over the title images. Star ratings, information and other functions are available when you mouse over the title images. We’ve also made some changes to several pages on the site: adding more rows, and filling out the rows with more TV shows & movies, which you can find by hovering your mouse over the end of a row.

Visually it looks good however, there are some usability issues that make the design terrible..and that is, to add a movie to my Q, or to see rating or to even see the name of the movie, I have to mouse over the artwork.. That is a terrible design decision.

ratings in the bubble :
The rating is one of the secret sauce of Netflix success and they help me find movies I might love..They should not be hidden in the bubble but should be prominent on the site.

Add to Q in the bubble : The previous design took two clicks to add a movie to the Q..The new design also takes 2 clicks..However, to click add to Q I have to move my mouse a greater distance than before..Also it is not very intuitive..It took me looking at a couple of bubbles to figure that out..

Name in the Bubble : Not that big a deal since the name for most of the movies is on the artwork..However some movies don't have a name on the cover or the name is not legible.

To see more information about the movie or to see user reviews it now takes one more click to get there..not great but not that bad either..

I was the one that originally sent this in to mike here at hackingnetflix; I have a quick follow up. I called netflix last night to sort of complain/find out how to find new releases for documentaries.

First off, the guy I talked to was extremely nice and cool. He indicated that he had gotten a LOT of complaints about the new layout; in fact he kept finishing my sentences when I'd describe something annoying. Apparently a major complaint is "the seasick effect" from having all of the side scrolling, but done in an uncontrolled way.

He also said they "pulled the switch on the change" yesterday, pretty much without warning to the support folks like him.

I told him my problems were this: 1) I hate the whole "hover over the end of a ribbon of DVD covers to get them to scroll thing. Hate it beyond all rationality. 2) what happened to the text titles over the covers? Many, many movies have the most abstract covers. Let me see a title. 3) the final row of the main "new releases" page used to allow me to change the category so I could see, say, all the new documentary releases. That's now gone. The guy on the phone helped me figure out how to get to this info; it's nowhere near as easy now, especially if you want to change genres... but at least it's still accessible.

Overall my experience on the phone with the guy was HIGHLY positive, and my experience with the new site is fairly negative. So netflix is still in the positive column for me; just down a notch or two...

I want to like it, but I can't. The bigger cover shot doesn't allow me to add films to my instant queue. So I have to search the film to get the "Add to Instant" button. I have to take a lot of previously unnecessary steps to do a simple task. It makes me sad.

As usual... Netflix fails to explain or communicate with customers as to what's happening. They do a major redesign and there isn't a little pop-up or box explaining the changes. Always the passive-aggressive approach.

The design seems to have promise, but for a company that supposedly does a lot of testing I think any five random people could tell you immediately that it still needs some work.

Some of you actually like this change? I can't believe anyone that claims they like it has actually looked at it, though one friend of mine really doesn't care... A very casual user that streams from the X-Box and not a computer, anyway.

I think they broke their streaming interface and am among those that have already canceled my account I'm so turned off by it.

This is an epic fail that just makes their interface slower, more clumzy and harder to use. They took ALL the info off the page including the movie titles and the hover box is slow. I'm not a speed reader, but I been surfing faster than 9600 baud for a long time and though there is a lot of visual bang on the new page, it feels like I'm crawling again, and no longer on broadband.

I want to stream movies. I do not want to spend hours looking for a movie to watch.

The title of the damn movie isn't even listed on the browse page. It doesn't get much more fail than that. I mean, seriously. A 5 year old could tell you that's dumb. However, it will ultimately be the lack of ability sort things that causes me to cancel. I'm giving it 1 month.

OMG - who dreamed up this user interface? It has "Techie" written all over - glitzy and not at all intuitive, sort of stuff programmers dream up. Doesn't Netflix run these sort of things by Marketing Focus Groups before implementing? I consider myself rather technically competent, and it took me a way too many minutes to figure how use the this new interface.

It's sure wonderful to be a monopoly, and be able to do this sort of stuff irrespective of how/whether your customers even like or dislike it or not. And don't hold your breath Netflix will make any changes to this new interface based on complaints.

It's fine that they're focusing on streaming. But "easier to use" and "improved" this ain't. I used the sortable list pages all the time, and not displaying the title with the picture is ... pretty dumb, if you ask me.

I think it is partly a step back in ease of use. Two things make it harder to quickly locate titles of interest. First you now have to mouse over every title for rating indicator which used to be at a glance info so it slows down list browsing if you are one avoiding titles of say 1 or 2 stars for example. Also the sortable list view was one of the easiest ways of finding movies of a specific year or highest or lowest rated etc. It is rare I use A-Z sort. Granted it isn't often I browse a list of movies by genre or by based on preferences. Personally I don't want to have to use 3rd party sites of apps to best find stuff on netflix I think netflix site should be built better to have those quality features. instantwatcher.com I think is an excellent example of many features the netflix site should have had by now.

The changes stink. I have to slowly scroll to find something in the new release section and they don't show all of the watch instant new releases in the row. I used to just click see all new releases. Everything they have done to the site is horrible except making the images larger. I don't know why the try to keep the good new releases to watch instantly a secret you have to go to another website to see what netflix just released.

Ugh it is AWFUL. I swear, every six months I get worried that Netflix is going to phase movie ratings out all together, and the whole POINT of the site, for me, is that I can aggregate data about movies I like in order to find other movies I will like.

Why can't we just have an easy interface for navigating my rating? Is there anyone who actually chooses movies based on the artwork?

What happened to the old saying of "Never judge a book by it's cover"?

With the new layout that's all I can do. No names or ratings are even listed. I am not going to hover over every single title to get rating info so now all I can do is look for the ones with pretty DVD box art and guess what I'll like based on that.

i have a slow computer and the new design moves fast for me.you slide the curser over and gives you title discrption everything. there are other things i would like to see worked out with the site and their roku app but beyond that , i love it.

Who ever thought that hiding useful information, such as titles, predicted (or actual) rating would be improvement? (What do they do for "Image Not Available"?)

Who ever thought that hover scrolling colliding with pop-up would be useful, so you hover for the pop-up at the right image and suddenly that image is off the page?

Whoever thought that having to navigate a couple inches across the page to add to the Instant Queue would be easier than over over "Play" and move the cursor a quarter of an inch straight up would be an improvement?

Who thought that removing "Sortable list" link would help? (I sometimes go to the "sortable list" and sort by rating to group what movies Netflix thinks I would like to the top of the list.)

This is worse than when Netflix decided to combine seasons of a show into one single rating, as if the degradation of a show over the years wasn't worthy of rating separately. (Case in point of such a TV series: Airwolf. The last season was after replacing the writers, the actors, and the back story. Of course it was far worse than the first thee seasons.)

I can honestly say i hate nearly everything about the new layout. It is not easy to add things to my Q anymore, but all the things that are wrong has been said many times so i will leave it with this. I hate it, and as a web designer myself i cant imagine someone taking a website with a massive amount of user interaction and change the whole site usability and visual and not give the users a "use old Netflix" option. Its absurd...

I like it as well. I don't use the page often--I like instantwatcher.com so I can sort by multiple values, like year released + genre + rating. But I love the bigger pictures--although I'd prefer the title in text as well--and I love the fact that I don't have to keep hitting the "next" arrow.

Having said that, if you really liked the old page this new one must be incredibly annoying.

What a shock! Another baby step towards streaming and away from DVD rental. This is their number one focus. Less DVD selection, less DVD promotion, less Blu-Rays, less replenishment of old disc stock. It will keep happening until the day they finally announce that they are phasing out mail altogether.

Why am I still a customer? Well, where else am I going rent some obscure 10-year-old documentary? But soon I will give up on them. The great appeal of Netflix to me was that they had absolutely everything. They will lose this advantage as they move to an all-streaming model. How I wish they had a viable competitor!

In one word?
Horrible. it might be good for scrolling on hand device, but losing the title link means I have to hover, mouse correctly, then click title to see if there are new episodes or if I already watched them all. The ratings stars are gone now, so I cannot easily set children s shows to "not interested", on my 24 inch monitor the images are way too big with no option to shrink it down. If you are developing for the mobile market - then please provide a classic interface and a mobile interface. Contrary to news driven popular myth, the PC is not going away, people are getting older so they won't be using their iCrap to watch netflix. I signed in for the very first time in an attempt to beg the developers to go back to where it was instead of going forward with this style of interface.